Janez Drnovsek

Janez Drnovsek receiving the 14th Dalai Lama at Brdo Castle at the start of the latter's visit to Slovenia, July 2002

12:01AM GMT 25 Feb 2008

Janez Drnovsek, the president of Slovenia from 2002 to 2007 who died on Saturday aged 57, experienced an epiphany after being diagnosed with cancer; he left his presidential palace in Ljubljana, dismissed most of his staff and moved with his dog to a mountain cabin near the village of Zaplana, where he grew organic food and baked his own bread.

By then Drnovsek, a former Communist and an economist by background, had been at the centre of Slovene politics for well over a decade, first as prime minister and then as president. A reserved and respected, if somewhat lacklustre, politician, he was best known for his achievement in controlling inflation and moving his country away from the blood-soaked intrigues of the Balkans into the European mainstream.

In 1999 he was diagnosed with cancer and had a kidney removed; but in 2001 he disclosed that his doctors had found further cancerous growths. Subsequently he decided to ditch conventional medicine in favour of veganism and "New Age" therapies. Having cast off the trappings of power, he might be seen wandering in the mountains dressed in Indian clothes, or playing a flute under a laurel-leaf hat of his own devising. Sometimes he would emerge from his hut to greet the trees, clad in a cloak of leaves to express his oneness with nature.

Drnovsek became filled with an earnest desire to bring an end to suffering - be it the plight of the lovelorn or that of the victims of ethnic violence in Darfur. He appealed to his fellow countrymen to join him in embracing the simple life in the hope of averting world catastrophe.

In January 2006 he resigned from his Liberal Democratic Party and formed a group called the Movement for Justice and Development. Its aims were to "raise human consciousness and make the world a better place" and to "restrict the logic of capital and profit and provide a social as well as an environmentally more balanced world". He also wrote a series of books with titles such as The Thoughts of Life and Awareness, Golden Thoughts, and Essence of the World (all 2006), in which he explored his search for inner equilibrium and world harmony. He had recently published another book, Dialogues.

Believing he had found "a higher consciousness", Drnovsek embarked on a personal crusade against "all things evil" and set out on a globe-trotting mission to share his "positive energy" with the rest of the world. This began in 2005 in Kosovo, where he launched a personal attempt to resolve the future of the disputed province through the power of positive thinking. But his proposal - to give the province conditional independence from Serbia - infuriated both sides in the dispute, and prompted the Serbs to cancel an official visit by Drnovsek to Belgrade.

Nothing daunted, the next year he launched a personal initiative to resolve the conflict in Darfur by inviting leaders of the rebel factions and the Sudanese government to a peace conference in Ljubljana. No one came. Meanwhile, in August an envoy whom Drnovsek had personally dispatched to Sudan was sentenced to two years in prison by a Sudanese court after crossing the border from Chad without a visa. It took the intervention of the EU to secure the man's release.

Drnovsek's handling of the affair prompted criticism from Slovenian diplomats, embarrassed at what they described as the amateur nature of his interventions and the damage they did to the country's reputation. In an effort to restrict his activities, the Slovenian government ordered a cut in the presidential budget.

But the affair did nothing to dent Drnovsek's popularity with his people. Indeed, his benign other-worldliness made Drnovsek one of the most popular figures in the country; and his Thoughts on Life and Awareness was second only to The Da Vinci Code on the Slovenian bestseller lists.

Drnovsek remained unapologetic about his peace initiatives, pointing out that conventional diplomacy had fared no better than his own freelance efforts.

Janez Drnovsek was born on May 17 1950 at Celje, Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia. After taking a degree and a doctorate in Economics at Ljubljana University he worked for a construction company, then at a bank in his home region of Zasavje. He became fluent in English, French, Spanish and German.

An active member of the Communist Party, Drnovsek spent a year as an economic adviser at the Yugoslav embassy in Cairo and, in 1986, was appointed to the assembly of the Slovenian republic and served as a delegate to the chamber of republics and provinces of the Yugoslav parliament.

In 1989, on the retirement of the Slovenian representative to the collective presidency of Yugoslavia, the Slovenian government, scenting a change in the air, decided to organise elections between two candidates for the position. Drnovsek, a comparative unknown, trounced the government's preferred candidate, Marko Bulc, to become the first elected statesman in Communist Yugoslavia. He served as chairman of the collective presidency in 1989-90 and in 1989 presided over the summit of non-aligned nations in Belgrade.

After Slovenia, along with Croatia, declared its independence in 1991, prompting the intervention of the Yugoslav Federal Army, Drnovsek was the principal negotiator between the Slovene leadership and the leaders of the former Yugoslavia in agreeing the country's independence and the army's withdrawal after a brief 10-day war of secession.

The next year, as president of the newly-formed Liberal Democratic Party of Slovenia, he was elected prime minister and, except for a few months in 2000, he continued to serve until 2002, leading his party to victory at the parliamentary elections in 1996 and 2000. After retiring as prime minister he was elected and sworn in as president of the Republic of Slovenia in December 2002.

As prime minister, Drnovsek took Slovenia into the European Union; and he managed to put on a brave face when the American president, George W Bush, then governor of Texas, introduced him as the leader of Slovakia. After his spiritual rebirth, however, he dismayed his government with his attacks on the EU - with his complaints, for instance, that it spent more on cows "than half the population of the world gets".

The Slovenian people, though, took their unconventional president to their hearts. When, late in 2005, a woman surprised him with the revelation that he had a 19-year-old daughter from a relationship they had had in the 1980s, the disclosure only added to his popularity.

Although Drnovsek claimed to be clear of his cancer, after he fainted during a public ceremony in June 2006 some began to express doubts as to whether vegetables and positive thinking really had cured him. But Drnovsek remained unmoved by reports of his imminent demise: "I have reached my inner peace and I am not afraid any more," he declared.

He did not run for a second term as president in elections late last year, and in December he was succeeded by Danilo Turk.

Janez Drnovsek received many honours, including his country's highest state decoration, the Golden Order of Freedom of the Republic of Slovenia.